A Frame of Reference for SOA Migration

Migration of legacy systems to service-based systems constitutes a key challenge of service-oriented system engineering, namely rehabilitation of pre-existing enterprise assets while conforming to service engineering principles. Over a decade there has been an increasing interest in the approaches addressing SOA migration. These approaches mainly differ in ‘what is migrated’ and ‘how the migration is performed’. Such differences aggravate achieving a general understanding of ‘what SOA migration entails’. To solve this problem, we conducted a systematic review that extracts main migration categories, called SOA migration families, from the approaches proposed in the research community. Based on the results of the systematic review, we describe eight distinct families along with their characteristics and goals. These families represent a first frame of reference for SOA migration which brings order and enhances understanding on how migration can be carried out.